author : Simon Winchester

The making of the Dictionary was a remarkable achievement by hundreds of ordinary and extraordinary men and women, whose stories have until now remained untold. Simon Winchester illuminates this diverse cast of characters for the first time, uniting original research and evidence from the Oxford University Press archives with gripping narrative flair.

In witty and absorbing prose, he paints lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colourful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (sometimes remembered for his fondness for his female sculling team), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent a half-century bringing the project to fruition. The story traces the origins of the English language and the first attempts to catalogue it, the growing desire for an all-inclusive dictionary, through to the triumphant publication of the first edition of the Dictionary in 1928 and beyond.

The Meaning of Everything is rich with captivating detail: how the word aardvark narrowly missed inclusion after being deemed too ‘scientific’ and too ‘foreign’, which editor of the Dictionary became the inspiration for Kenneth Grahame’s Ratty in The Wind in the Willows, why Tolkien found it so difficult to define walrus, and how the word bondmaid was missed out of the first edition simply because the piece of paper on which it was written had fallen behind a pile of books.

With his characteristic gift for storytelling, Simon Winchester brings one of the most fascinating of forgotten histories to life.

In this mesmerising book, bestselling author Simon Winchester argues that the dazzling advances that produced the scientific and industrial revolutions were based on one single engineering element: precision. Precision is an essential part of the items we value in our daily lives – whether a camera or phone, computer or car, dishwasher or washing machine – as all sport components that fit together exactly and operate with near perfection. And yet, while we live lives peppered with it, we are not entirely sure what precision is, or what it means. Nor how and when it began to build the modern world.

Exactly takes us back to precision’s pioneers, to the origins of the Industrial Age in Britain with stories of John ‘Iron-Mad’ Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden and Joseph Whitworth. As manufacturing developed in the early twentieth century, Henry Royce developed the Rolls-Royce and in the United States Henry Ford began mass production of cars. Winchester’s story of increasingly impressive inventions continues with Hattori’s Seiko, Leica lenses and the invention of the jet engine, as well as today’s cutting-edge developments from Europe, Asia and North America.

As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society? This thrilling journey through the technology that drives society is both a homage and a warning for our future.